I am trying to get plymouth working (for a change), but I am not sure this is the way things are supposed to work.

I have tried to get it to work many times in the past, but never really succeeded. At least, not in the way that other shinny distros do out there.

I have a radeon (r300) chip, and it's working fine with kms. I am using a 1440x900 resolution for a flicker free transition, since that's what xrandr shows, that's what I am passing to the kernel as well.

I know the kms framebuffer is working anyway, because plymouth comes just fine at some point, when the plymouth service starts. But... is this really the way it's supposed to work?

That's quite too late (x comes up a couple of seconds after that so...). Plus it doesn't make sense that I have to do all the dracut ramdisk stuff if it's a system service the one that will launch the splash screen, does it?

As for the ramdisk, dracut -H runs without problems. I also tried to do "plymouth-set-default-theme -R solar", and it outputs the same that dracut does. The ramdisks seems to be created without problems, but I am not sure it's doing its job, I've never felt sympathy for this whole initrd mess:

Plymouth has been compiled with caps, openrc and libkms support, and all the kms, agp, etc stuff is marked '*' in my kernel, not as a module, so it should be available as soon as the kernel loads...

I have no idea what else to check, in all these years I have never been able to make this work in a very wide range of hardware, so I think there must be something fundamentally wrong in something I am doing. My understanding is that plymouth is the thing that big distros (tm) use to get this shinny splashes from a very early stage, since jut a few milliseconds from the point when you press enter in the grub menu.

Oh, plymouth doesn't come up on shutdown, and console decos don't work either, but I guess that's a different problem.
At this stage, any ideas is welcome._________________Gentoo Handbook | My website

no answers to this? i have exactly the same problems here, and they make the plymouth packages rather pointless: it's a bit ridiculous if a bootsplash half-way through the boot messages is considered to be working properly! plymouth on other distros has a silky smooth transition from grub menu to instant graphical splash to x login manager...no flickers, let alone blank screens or boot script messages. fbsplash, or even the old bootsplash patch for that matter, is much better than this because it hides (or frames or whatever) the boot messages as intended. and, yes, bootsplash, fbsplash, and plymouth on other distros all work during shutdown as well as bootup. i'm hoping i92guboj and i have our plymouth setups misconfigured somehow...otherwise, this is pointless and we're better off going back to the old framebuffer splash stuff.

Yeah, looks like it is unusable. I'm not quite sure what it's doing in portage given that it doesn't actually work, but I guess the ease of installation makes it more likely that someone will hack on it until it does. Not me though...I've uninstalled it too

I'm new to gentoo and couldnt't get the portage version of plymouth to work for me at all. So, I took a crack at writing a git ebuild (the one through layman uses an abandoned repo), but I slacked off and just installed it locally from the currently active git repo and told portage the package was provided. Also, I installed plymouth to the /usr directories instead of / It works fine now, but...

I doubt most gentooers are going to like my solution to get the splash to show up earlier: systemd. With openrc it had the same problems you all are describing (the splash showing up way too late) and I couldn't find a fix for it. I like systemd (please don't kill me for that because I like openrc too. Yet...). I come from Arch Linux and before that Fedora, so I'm very familiar/comfortable with systemd at this point. Once I had systemd installed, plymouth magically worked just as advertised.

I'm sure it's possible to get plymouth to work with openrc. It's just that the openrc plugin in portage doesn't seem to be working.

I am trying to get plymouth working (for a change), but I am not sure this is the way things are supposed to work.

Same here. No luck either. I can see plymouth for a split second before the display manager takes over. I even setup systemd to see if this makes a difference. The system in question has an intel and a nvidia graphic chip.

So my question, did anyone ever manage to setup plymouth in a way it comes at least close to osx or windows in terms of smoothness?

Well I think I have plymouth working using systemd. One barely has time to admire the fancy bootsplash before lightdm takes over because of the speed systemd does its stuff, but it definitely kicks in for about the same time as one saw systemd stuff flashing past the screen without plymouth. And the transition to lightdm is not that smooth, a brief flash of text then a black bit. All in all, not really worth it. Whereas with openrc there would be more time to see it I guess.

One reason it didn't work originally was I had the RADEON_FB driver installed in the kernel, which apparently conflicts with KMS and the CONFIG_DRM_RADEON driver.

Hmm, well just saw this, I have been using it more or less successfully for 1.5 years on a 32 bit eee with Intel 945gm and for about a year on nvidia core 2 machine. Openrc, systemd isn't necessary.
It can be tricky for sure. I used to use uvesa on the nvidia but recently switched to simple fb, I dunno, works about the same. It flashes a few times on startup as the card is changing modes(?) or testing itself, something, then a couple of seconds of black, then slim. And yeah, on shutdown it's only on for a couple of seconds and then switches to console with shutdown messages. This changed recently, in fact, through this whole period things change with new kernels, who knows what all.
I think I have the intelFB on the eee. It works a little better there last I noticed, again, changes from time to time from updates. On that I use lightdm, latest update to slim won't go on 32 bit it seems, time to move on as slim is now dead. It was good to me, a pain sometimes, but at least it could be easily modified, unlike lightdm.